I peaked too early

So, last weekend we tried the 3 peaks of Yorkshire walk - I've only now been able to hobble over to the computer to type this.

1st Peak: After a slap up breakfast we tramped up the first peak, Penyghent without any major problems, aside from a little grumbling about the almost vertical last few hundred metres.



2nd Peak: It took us a few hours to walk to the next peak, Whernside, mostly through bogs, and the peak itself was a veerrryyy long ascent to a veeerrryy windy summit - damn fine views though.



3rd Peak: Well, that's where my story ends.....as I had to abandon things there due to a dodgy knee that was giving me grief when coming down the mountains. From the look of it, and the reports from the survivors, it seemed like a veeeerrryyy hard ascent, and then a race down to get to the final peak in time.

4th Peak: The beer garden of the pub we stayed at - very easy ascent and a lovely summit.....

Altogether the 1 peakers did 12 miles, the 2 peakers 18 miles and the 3 peakers did 26 miles, and we reckoned Ali, a four-legged member of the gang, did about 75 miles due to the constant running backwards from his usual spot in the lead. Everyone seemed to have fun...even the mad people who did the 3rd peak.

Smells

Smells have an amzing ability to trigger memories: this morning I was riding into work and passed a road crew repairing the road surface. As I passed I got a smell from whatever material it was they were repairing the road with: and it smelled to me like caps for toy guns.

This led to an immediate flashback to when I was a kid, playing games that would involve using rolls and rolls of caps and cheap cap guns. After a while of course I realised that shooting one cap at a time from a gun was too slow and so moved onto bashing the caps 2 or 3 at a time with rocks. This also became a bit frustrating after a while, and so the final step was to just set the whole roll of caps on fire and watching them all go off in a few seconds, like a Chinese firecracker. This fascination with watching things burn remained until the regrettable incident years later involving an electric bar fire, some tissue paper, and a large burn mark in the carpet.

The sense of smell seems to be an overlooked sense, coming 3rd in the list after the glamourous senses of sight and hearing but it is another sense so can people lose their sense of smell like they can lose their hearing and sight? I wear glasses, and a combination of lousy genes and a history of Van Halen on headphones will probably cause my hearing to go in the future, but could I lose my smell too? Do strong smells ruin your sense of smell like loud noises damage your ears? If so I suppose I'd better lay off the Stilton and chorizo sandwiches, as my sense of smell may be all I have left in later life...

Hard Boiled Weekend

Well this weekend I've been taking it easy due to a "goddamn bastard cold/cough thing that just won't go away" (official name), so I've been reading and hanging out around the house, which would have been nice and restful if I hadn't been reading Jim Thompson stories and gone to see Sin City on Saturday.

After that lot I spent Sunday mooching about the house, wearing a fedora and standing in the shadows of doorways watching people, getting rough with the cats when they started cracking wise, and moaning about "dames" a lot. Mind you, it gave me an excuse to drink a lot of whiskey, which is no bad thing.